All morning long, I’ve been getting letters in the inbox about my “latest” article at Investing for Beginners. I have no idea what they are talking about because the article in question, which isn’t even an article, it is a “quick tip” template that was meant as a side bar to another piece, was published years ago and has not been featured anywhere on either of sites.
For the past day, I’ve been thinking about a 65 year old man named John Demetriou. He was from Cyprus, but moved to Australia, where he spent 35 years working “days, nights and weekends in Sydney markets selling jewellery and imitation jewellery” according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Wanting to be in his home country, and…
McDonald’s is one of those businesses that I love. The last time we talked about it was when I wrote the 25 Year Investment Case Study of McDonald’s, and showed how you could have turned $100,000 into anywhere between $1,839,033 and $5,547,089 depending on how you handled dividend reinvestment and the Chipotle split-off back in 2006, and the sorely lacking media coverage of McDonald’s results in February. No matter which way you look at it, despite periods of overvaluation and undervaluation, alternating with the underlying performance and the emotional moods of shareholders, McDonald’s has been a fantastic company. It makes its employees and shareholders a lot of money. It gives society something it wants, whether that be a plain salad with side of fresh fruit and a non-sweetened iced tea or a double cheeseburger with french fries and a Coca-Cola.
One of the most important lessons I learned very early in life came from a series of psychology studies that I read for entertainment. It talked about how the big troubles we face – the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the foreclosure of a home – are often overcome because our natural defense systems activate, causing our behavior to moderate with time so that we accept what has happened, rebuild, and put it behind us. The things that cause unhappiness that is both severe and chronic are not these major shocks; they are the small irritations that build up and wear away at you like Chinese water torture.
We’ve talked about the 1929 period a lot lately, but what you need to remember is that it was a walk in the park compared to 1933. It wasn’t until then that everyone had gone broke, given up hope, and sworn off stocks for life, leaving great businesses trading at double-digit dividend yields and a…
For the serious investors among you, I recommended a book about the 1929-1933 crash that is the single best statistical resource on the subject I have ever encountered. After talking about it on the site, I’m going back through the 700+ pages and I really can’t emphasize enough how seeing the effects of the worst…
A week ago, I recommended a now-out of print book from 30 years ago that was an academic study of the Great Depression called The Crash and Its Aftermath. It is, hands down, the most useful statistical survey of the Great Depression and the 1929-1933 period I have ever read. It instantly ranks up there…
I am committed to this minimalism and de-cluttering project. Since beginning this change, it has been wonderfully freeing. If something hasn’t been used in the past twelve months, it is donated or discarded. Everything has a place and the systems at home were changed so that the basic act of living, going through the day, takes care of keeping everything maintained without any extra work. Now that this phase of the pantry is done, I am turning my attention to the library.
C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General of the United States, has passed away. He was 96 years old. The devout, conservative, evangelical Christian born the grandchild of German immigrants was one of the great pragmatist of the past few generations, proving that a fact-based, rational approach to life can improve standard of living, reduce disease,…
In 1985, one of the greatest scholarly works ever penned on the Great Depression was published by Barrie A. Wigmore under the title The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933. Using actual data from the period that took years to acquire, analyze, and interpret, Wigmore takes 751 pages…